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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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By the way, that drop down list lets you identify as things you don't have to prove, like being an investor and such. So I wonder how much that shit got abused to get attention.

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I also wrote a similar message. 

 

 

I did enjoy that Jeff Gerstmann retweeted this though:

 iRw6uNCOui5CF.png

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I dunno if it happened to any of you, but some GG people are searching mentions of Intel to argue or otherwise shit-talk to people talking about what's going on.

 

An ollllllld friend of mine made her two tweets about it, and now her name is being passed around for organized harassment, because she 'lied' and said it was a harassment campaign.

 

So y'know. This shit isn't getting better.

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Likewise with my Twitter feed (the outrage from developers, not the GG people looking for mentions).

 

Edit: I know which friend you're talking about, I've met her and she's lovely. I suspect she's suddenly being targeted and I'm not because of our respective genders :(

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I retweeted something at the same time I sent an email (the first time I've tweeted anything in forever) and have yet to see any reply to it.

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Weird gifs aside, "Letter writing campaign coordinated" is hardly a smoking gun. It's not like they're talking about using sock puppets there or anything.

 

If you want to write to Intel too though:

https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate-responsibility-contact-us.html

 

Thanks for the link. Since Teacher/Student is an option in the drop down menu (get 'em using your tech young!) I exploited my job in the letter. My contribution:

 

"Hello,

 
I am a fifth grade teacher at a middle school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. While I rarely have time to actually play any video games, I follow the industry and as such the recent fuss kicked up by the "gamergate" movement has been on my radar. I came across a news story today that your company pulled advertising from Gamasutra recently in response to a letter writing campaign by these people. I would like to register my disappointment in this decision. This movement is one which has, from all evidence I have seen, been a front to legitimize the appalling behaviour of a group of cyber bullies, and I worry that these people will be emboldened by this. Whatever your actual concerns with Gamasutra, this will be seen as a political act by their movement and will add fuel to a fire which has already burned brightly with death threats, rape threats, and invasions of privacy, to name only a few of the tactics this movement has been using and proudly associated with. I worry very much that in pulling your advertisements, you have given them a way to claim justification of these actions.  
 
While I know that the voice of one Canadian English teacher is not going to compare to the might of a letter writing campaign by an internet movement, I felt compelled to write to you in response to this development. I have certainly lost respect for your company in light of it, and will be hoping for better news in the future.
 
Thank you for your time,
- MY NAME"

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The @IntelGaming twitter account is actively courting gaters tonight. Here's an imgur album of some of their tweets.

 

URLs are/were here, here, and here, although one of these sets was deleted, so maybe the others will be deleted as well. I bet it's probably a rogue idiot. Even if you already wrote once, it might be a good idea to write again specifically about this.

 

In the first conversation in the gallery, they passive aggressively include Gamasutra in mentions. In the next, they jump in to a conversation with someone who celebrates Intel's decision with an image of Phil Fish, who was doxxed by gaters.

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Thanks for the link. Since Teacher/Student is an option in the drop down menu (get 'em using your tech young!) I exploited my job in the letter.

 

Well, I chipped in my two cents, too. I thought about putting my academic affiliation to the fore as well, but I liked it better just as a letter from a consumer who has only owned computers with Intel processors for the past twenty years.

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I wrote to them as well. Has anyone received any replies yet? Considering the volume of emails they must be receiving, I'd guess not.

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Fuck me... this Intel stuff is depressing. Especially their twitter account using the GatorGate tweets to sell hardware... :(

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Dropping this here instead of the feminism thread, as it seems thematically related to the kind of crazy gater bullshit, except that it is book publishing not games.

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i'm paraphrasing a tweet, but nothing screams "restoring journalistic integrity from corporate influence" like pressuring advertisers to dictate a website's content. 

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Fuck me... this Intel stuff is depressing. Especially their twitter account using the GatorGate tweets to sell hardware... :(

 

I wonder how much of that is just the result of a low-level employee running the twitter account with orders to be pleasant to everyone and make frequent mentions of products the company wants to push. It reads like less of a pro-Gator stance than a bland positive response from someone paid to be nice to everyone (which doesn't minimize the problems with them pulling ads).

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Chris Remo got into a big conversation tonight with TotalBiscuit regarding the New York Times article about gamergate. 

 

I only want to post this, because it's a very stupid thing a person wrote:

 

AOThYAK.png

 

I'm having trouble viewing the whole thing, including this specific quote. Is there a better way to view the conversation, asinine chiming-in by the GG boys and all, than just clicking on the inciting tweet?

 

Also, TotalBiscuit shows as firm a grasp of "balanced" with regards to events reporting as he does to "ethics" with regards to Steam Curation. Apparently, you're not allowed to say anything pejorative about a group unless your article includes not just a quote but an entire interview from that group, no matter the relevance of their full stance to the event in question. I look forward to all the New York Times articles where they interview members of ISIS before they decide it's ethical to call them "terrorists" in each article.

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Chris Remo got into a big conversation tonight with TotalBiscuit regarding the New York Times article about gamergate. 

 

I only want to post this, because it's a very stupid thing a person wrote:

 

AOThYAK.png

 

I don't understand how people can think like this. Society-at-large has a big misogyny problem that applies to the majority, so how hard can it be to accept that maybe any sufficiently large group that exists in the world will probably have a big misogyny problem that applies to the majority?

 

I'm so glad I stopped paying attention to TotalBiscuit years ago.

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There really isn't much to say to somebody who doesn't see the awful, personal attacks on Anita, Zoe, and others as pure misogyny and representative of a significant portion of their "critics."

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TB would say that vicious, unfair attacks on people are an internet problem. I remember his vicious, unfair attacks on his podcast. He obviously is under the illusion that this is just how the internet does things.

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Christ, so pretty much the entire exchange is Chris addressing things TotalBiscuit says, but TotalBiscuit just ignores questions or things Chris brings up to him (that require input back) just to push whatever narrative / opinion he wants. It's very hard to have discussions with people like that.

 

"What ethics were breached?" - a question Chris asks regarding an opinion piece (Leigh's) that TB never, ever answers. Instead, TB just keeps saying something about past articles or some shit.

 

Edit - TotalBiscuit is like the Bill O'Reilly of internet personalities.

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To others trying to read the converstion: I don't use Twitter myself, so it took me a while to figure this out. Here's a custom search that shows the entire conversation between @chrisremo, @Totalbiscuit, and @gormanate (though it does not show Chris's initial link to the article in question, since Chris didn't mention @Totalbiscuit in that tweet). To read the conversation, scroll down until you see TotalBiscuit's response to the article (the one that ends with "thats bollocks"), then read upward.

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Christ, so pretty much the entire exchange is Chris addressing things TotalBiscuit says, but TotalBiscuit just ignores questions or things Chris brings up to him (that require input back) just to push whatever narrative / opinion he wants. It's very hard to have discussions with people like that.

 

"What ethics were breached?" - a question Chris asks regarding an opinion piece (Leigh's) that TB never, ever answers. Instead, TB just keeps saying something about past articles or some shit.

 

Edit - TotalBiscuit is like the Bill O'Reilly of internet personalities.

 

Yeah, I'm really baffled by parts of his argument. Some of it is just having a half-formed opinion, of which we are all guilty, but some of it is also moving the goalposts back and forth so his position, whatever it may be, is always on the side of gamers, whoever they may be. TotalBiscuit starts out talking about the duty of games journalists to interview both sides, because a one-sided narrative is harmful to the unity of gamer culture. When Chris successfully rebuts him that the ethics of journalism require neither events reporting nor opinion pieces to have a point/counterpoint format, TB shifts to arguing for the need for games journalists to be consumer advocates who reflect the interests and opinions of their audience, which he naturally assumes is the 18-to-25 "core gamer" demographic, and goes on to contradict his previous set of points entirely by asserting that games journalism should come from the perspective of gamers. Chris, of course, responds that there are different types of games journalism, which TB blows past because it's really inconvenient to both arguments he's made thus far, and it all devolves precipitously from there. By the end, TB is arguing that games journalists need to protect gamers as a community and culture from negative attention in the mainstream at any cost, which is quite possibly the furthest thing imaginable from "balanced" reporting and reveals to me his roots as a YouTube pundit to an embarrassing degree. I don't blame Chris at all for disengaging, because TB clearly thinks that his own ad-hoc system of ethics he's developed doing videos over the years should be broadly applicable to anyone reporting on any kind of news in gaming.

 

And Jesus, when will I stop hearing the complaints about Leigh Alexander's "the term 'gamer' is dead" editorial? The more that people try to refute it with these myopic arguments for their own relevance, the more they prove her right.

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